Unity Farm Journal - First Week of October 2016

What a year at Unity Farm: a plague of winter moth, a spring gypsy caterpillar infestation, deep drought, and maybe Hurricane Matthew, which is heading up the coast, might affect our foliage color and branch-falling.  Life on a farm is never boring.Every October we press cider using the apples that were most successful that season. This year our mixture is 40% McIntosh, 40% Cortland, and 20% Macoun.  Last weekend we hand pressed 250 pounds and created a cider with a ph of 3.3 and a specific gravity of 1.054 which will yield a finished alcohol by volume of 6-7%.  Although the drought created great stress in the apples, they are very flavorful and we extracted 2.5 gallons of fresh cider per bushel (42 pounds) we pressed.After two weeks of fermentation, we ’ll rack the cider off the yeast, and age over the Winter, bottling and carbonating in the Spring.As Halloween approaches we always plant garlic and this year, we ’ve created a 16’ x 16’ main garlic bed and three 4’ x 8’ satellite garlic beds.  The garlic will grow strong enough before the snow falls and then will become dormant over the winter, exploding with fresh growth in the Spring in time for a July harvest.We ’re starting to experience nights in the 40’s so we moved the pigs from the Summer Cottage to the Winter Pig Palace.  They now spend their afternoons with their bellies facing south to absorb the warm of the sun.  By nightfall they burrow in their ha...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs